Christophe Pallier (1,2), Anne Cutler (1), Nuria Sebastian-Galles (2)

Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a
function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight
in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments
were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to
separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted
that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the
segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The
task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks
of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which
it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in
both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental
information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the
effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the
degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated
by the predictability of stress placement in the language.